


you taught me victory's sweet, even deep in the cheap seats

by jane_wanderlust



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-24
Updated: 2012-01-24
Packaged: 2017-10-30 02:12:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_wanderlust/pseuds/jane_wanderlust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damon and Katherine, one too many years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you taught me victory's sweet, even deep in the cheap seats

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "Cape Canaveral," by Conor Oberst.

 --------------------------------

  
Katherine pushed her heels back into the delicate fabric of her boots and berated herself. It wasn’t the time or place for wanting: here, in the middle of the Salvatore’s home, surrounded by guests and people she had no care for learning their names.  
   
But then, she had never been one for the acknowledgment of propriety, and Damon’s fingers round the delicate etching of the glass he was holding caused her toes to feel weightless and fraught.  
  
 _Odd,_  she thought. He’d been home almost a fortnight and she’d caught him unawares not a single time. She wondered if the war had taught him something about suppression, or maybe all his marked indifference had just succumbed to paranoia.  
   
 _Soldiers,_  she thought. But she felt grim instead of disgusted; raw instead of annoyed. Before, Damon had been open, and he’d swallowed the words off her tongue. Sucking them down his throat; blunt teeth on the soft edges of words she’d believed she wasn’t feeling, wasn’t saying; hiding her weakness in the flesh of his voice.  
   
She watched him smile tightly, felt heat surge toward her toes, rooting her solidly to the ground.  _And for what?_  She thought. For naught.  
   
Katherine sighed, this game of his wasn’t fun; and if she wasn’t winning, and he wasn’t winning, how was it a game at all? She watched him ignoring her - dutifully, restlessly - painfully obvious in the compressing of the skin around his eyes. He needn’t the effort, really. To her, he was transparent, and all of the things he thought he was hiding were looping stories over his face.  
   
 _Boring_ , she thought. It was all so boring. But the wine in his glass slipped looser in the bottom of its cage, and she watched as Damon brought the glass to his lips, tipped his head - on its long neck - backward, and swallowed with ease; the knob in his throat bending gracefully.  
   
It was all so useless. She turned her eyes back to the conversation she wasn’t having, ruptured George Lockwood’s sentence in the middle of his words, inclined her head and walked away lightly, purposefully, in her delicate boots. She wondered – if only briefly – what the wolf had been telling her. Then, as the air around her changed, found she didn’t quite care.  
   
“Mr. Salvatore, I am so pleased to see you’ve come,” Katherine said, saccharinity slickening the words in her mouth. Damon smiled tightly again, and she felt her gut twist. That look on his face wasn’t right. It seemed off and misplaced, and it made her blood press achingly in her veins.  
   
“Miss Katherine, please. Mr. Salvatore is my father. Damon, if you would,” he told her, like they knew not the curves of each other; like they knew not the deepest places that love grew.  _No,_  she thought. Not love, never that. How fickle; how stupid this game.

Katherine acquiesced, pursed her lips for emphatic theatrics, and almost laughed at his childishness; almost laughed at her own.  
   
“Damon, then,” she stopped, dropped her lashes over her eyes, cloying and brash. “Whoever you are, I am nonetheless pleased to see you here; and to hear you, as well. I have not spoken with you in – what? Days?” she asked, pointed and filled.  
   
“Too long entirely, Miss Katherine," he replied, pointed and filled. She watched him wet his lips.  
   
She wanted to rip from him her title, tell him:  _Why do you address me so? I am no maiden; you are no stranger. I’ve seen the shape your mouth makes in the deepest hour of the night; I know the feel of your skin; the smell, the taste._  
   
She said none of these traitorous things, but instead reached for his emptied wine glass. There was a bead of reddened sweetness stuck to the rim – and the color, the smell, was an entirely heady thing. Damon let her the glass, and watched with careful eyes as her tongue darted out to capture the moisture; pull it into her mouth.  
   
And there it was: want. He wanted, too: heady and powerfully; the denial of such a thing an exhausting toll in his eyes. She smirked. Why did he bother with games when she knew not how to lose?  
   
 _Silly boy,_  she thought. She made a sound of pleasure, low and intimate – meant for him, only for him – in the back of her throat.  
   
“Your father does have such a taste for these things," she told him, as she pressed the glass back into his palm, her fingers lingering on the pulse threading frantically in his wrist. Her tongue hurt; her mouth tautened.  _Silly boy._  
   
She let him his false beliefs of valor; his ridiculous notions of victory, bent her knees in a propositioning half-curtsy, and turned from him, greedy and whetted.  
   
It took him half the length of the remainder of the party, and two more glasses of wine to find her; to find his real boldness, tucked away inside the masquerade of a man.  
   
She laughed into his wine-sweetened mouth, thought hungrily of the cling of the taste in his blood; let his hands their purchase on her flesh.  
   
He tightened the fingers of one hand around the dip of her waist, slid the other up the swell of her breast.  
   
“So reckless you are,” she told him as she bit into his mouth, past his teeth, gifting him the appetite of her words.  
   
“Only for you,” he replied, his words hot and steady on the shell of her ear.  
   
His heft and weight around her was a salve to her bruised thoughts; her smile was an eclipse.

 

\--------------------------------

**Author's Note:**

> For waltzmatildah over at LJ.


End file.
